The Drop Bag is stocked with Active Pursuit reading to enjoy at the finish line of your day, or the office equivalent of an aid station. The name refers to the drop bags that competitors use to get their post-race necessities from the start line to the finish line of point-to-point races. Look for it as a mid-week feature on The Active Pursuit.
Burke talks about Armstrong: Trek Bicycle Corp. President John Burke shared his thoughts on Lance Armstrong in an interview with Don Walker, from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. This stood out among the notable comments: “I think that what Lance did was he got a lot of people in America riding bikes. That’s his legacy. Trek’s business went up because of that. And do did everybody else’s.”
How to run faster: Shape.com tapped the expertise of elite ultra runner Carolyn Smith, for a guide to running faster and burning more calories. Smith is a sports medicine physician at Marquette University. In this piece, she elaborates on using your arms, running up hills, fartleks, strength training and other strategies to pick up the pace.
Beware of anti-inflammatories:The Journal Sentinel’s Lori Nickel produced an excellent series focusing on the health issues of NFL football players, and some of the information is valuable for endurance athletes, as well, particularly this warning from Douglas McKeag, a professor emeritus at the Indiana University School of Medicine: The weekend runner who pops Motrin before running a 10-kilometer race so he can run through aches and pains is actually taking a big risk. The runner might suffer a new injury and not feel the usual warning signs of pain. “All you’re doing there is masking the pain,” McKeag said. “You’re fooling your system into thinking that somehow it would be OK to run when your body is painful enough that you shouldn’t be running.”
The NYC Marathon in Wisconsin: Congratulations to Angie Hatch, of Hudson, who criss-crossed the city to run a Wisconsin version of the New York City Marathon.
A matter of faith:I found this blog post by Ashley Kumlien to be a thoughtful reflection on her faith in God and her struggle to figure out how to incorporate that, delicately, into her charity work through MS Run the US. “I wasn’t sure how Faith and God fit into the non-profit. Was it PC to broadcast my family’s beliefs when the mission of the non-profit is to raise funds for MS research? Would that inevitably turn people away if their beliefs were different?”
